The Rogue Who Was Pardoned For Stealing The Crown Jewels

The story of Colonel Thomas Blood is one of the most audacious and genuinely baffling episodes in all of British history — the tale of a charming rogue who came within a whisker of stealing the Crown Jewels of England from the Tower of London itself, was caught red-handed committing treason, and then, instead of being torn apart on the scaffold as he should have been, was personally pardoned and richly rewarded by the very King he had tried to rob. It is a heist story, a mystery, and a puzzle that historians have never been able to solve.

To understand it, you have to meet the man. Thomas Blood was an Irish-born adventurer, a soldier of the English Civil Wars, and by 1671 a notorious troublemaker, plotter, and desperado — a man who had already been involved in a wild plot to storm Dublin Castle, and, more astonishingly still, in a brazen attempt to kidnap and even kill one of the King’s leading men, the Duke of Ormonde, dragging him from his coach through the streets of London. Blood was, in short, exactly the sort of dangerous rogue the Crown had every reason to hang. But Blood’s masterpiece was still to come. Because he had set his sights on the greatest prize in the kingdom: the Crown Jewels themselves.

At that time, the coronation regalia of England — a new set, made for Charles II after the originals had been destroyed during the Civil War — were kept in the Tower of London, in the care of an elderly Assistant Keeper of the Jewels named Talbot Edwards, who lived with his family in the Tower and made a little extra money by showing the jewels to members of the public for a fee. And Blood saw his opportunity in exactly that arrangement. His plan was not a smash-and-grab, but a long, patient confidence trick.

The Horror

Some weeks before the theft, Blood arrived at the Tower disguised as a respectable country clergyman — a parson, calling himself Mr Ayliffe — accompanied by a woman posing as his wife, in reality a hired actress named Jenny Blaine. They asked the kindly old keeper, Talbot Edwards, to show them the Crown Jewels. And partway through the viewing, Blood’s “wife” suddenly pretended to be taken ill — whereupon the Edwards family, all concern, took the couple upstairs to their private apartment to recover. It was a deliberate ploy to worm his way into the family’s trust, and it worked perfectly. Over the following days, “Parson Blood” cultivated a warm friendship with the Edwardses, returning with gifts, including four pairs of white gloves for Mrs Edwards. He grew so close to them that he even proposed a marriage between Edwards’s pretty daughter and his own fictional wealthy “nephew.” The trap was set. The old keeper had come to see the charming parson as a friend.

And so, at seven o’clock on the morning of the 9th of May 1671, Blood returned to the Tower — bringing his “nephew” and two other men, who were in fact his accomplices, to meet Edwards’s daughter and, he suggested, to have a look at the famous jewels while they waited. The trusting Edwards led them down to the basement chamber where the regalia were kept behind an iron grille, and unlocked the door. And the moment his back was turned, the trap sprang shut. Blood and his men threw a cloak over the old man’s head, gagged him, and when the seventy-seven-year-old keeper struggled and fought back, Blood struck him savagely over the head with a wooden mallet, and stabbed him. With Edwards beaten down, the gang tore away the grille and set about the jewels. And what they did next is the detail that has delighted people for three and a half centuries. Faced with the great, awkward, jewelled objects, they simply set about mangling them to make them fit under their clothes. Blood took his mallet and beat St Edward’s Crown — the crown of England — flat, hammering it down so he could hide it under his parson’s cloak. One of his men stuffed the golden Orb, the great symbol of sovereignty, down the front of his breeches. And the royal Sceptre proved too long to fit into their bag — so another of the gang produced a file and began, incredibly, trying to saw the Sceptre of England in half.

And it was that final delay that undid them. Because at that very moment, the old jewel-keeper, Talbot Edwards, battered and bleeding, regained consciousness — and managed to work the gag loose from his mouth, and began to shout, at the top of his lungs, the alarm: “Treason! Murder! The crown is stolen!” His cries rang out through the Tower. The thieves panicked. They dropped the half-sawn sceptre, and ran, Blood with the flattened crown of England hidden under his coat, making a desperate dash for the Tower gates and the horses waiting outside. He very nearly made it. But the alarm had been raised, and the guards moved to stop them. Blood even fired a pistol at a warder as he ran. And there, at the Iron Gate of the Tower of London, Colonel Thomas Blood was seized and wrestled to the ground — with the battered, priceless crown of the King of England still concealed on his body. He had been caught, quite literally, red-handed, stealing the Crown Jewels.

The Modern Relic

By every law and custom of the age, Colonel Blood was now a dead man. He had committed armed robbery, violence, and treason, in the royal fortress itself, against the very symbols of the monarchy. The penalty was certain and it was horrific: to be hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor. And here the story takes its extraordinary, inexplicable turn. Because Blood, on being captured, made a strange and audacious demand: he refused to speak to anyone but the King himself. And even more strangely, King Charles II agreed. Blood was brought before the King, along with the great men of the court, to be questioned. And instead of cowering, he was bold, charming, and unrepentant. When told the jewels were valued at a hundred thousand pounds, Blood reportedly scoffed that they were worth no more than six thousand. He even freely admitted to his earlier plots, including the plan to kill the King himself — but claimed he had found he could not do it. And then Charles asked him the question at the heart of the whole mystery: “What if I should give you your life?” And Blood replied, with perfect, humble cheek: “I would endeavour to deserve it, Sire.”

And Charles II did exactly that. To the utter astonishment and fury of his court — and especially of the Duke of Ormonde, the very man Blood had once tried to murder — the King not only spared Colonel Blood’s life and pardoned him completely for all his crimes, but restored to him his confiscated estates in Ireland, granting him lands worth five hundred pounds a year, a considerable fortune. The man who had beaten a royal servant with a mallet and tried to steal the crown of England walked free, rich, and pardoned, and became a well-known and welcome figure around the court and the city of London for the rest of his life. It was one of the most baffling royal decisions ever made, and no one has ever fully explained it. Why did Charles II reward the man who tried to rob him? Was the merry, pleasure-loving King simply so amused and impressed by Blood’s sheer nerve and charm that he couldn’t bring himself to hang him? Or — as many have long suspected — was there something more? The most enduring theory is that Blood had secretly been working, or would now work, as a spy and secret agent for the Crown, and that the “pardon” was really the price of his services, or a reward for services already rendered in the murky world of Restoration espionage. The truth went to the grave with Blood and the King. It remains an unsolved historical mystery.

The relic is the greatest one imaginable, and it sits under armed guard to this day. The Crown Jewels that Colonel Blood so nearly made off with — including St Edward’s Crown, which he flattened with his mallet, and the Sovereign’s Orb, which his accomplice stuffed down his trousers — survive, repaired and gleaming, and are on display in the Jewel House at the Tower of London, seen by millions of visitors from all over the world every year. St Edward’s Crown was hammered back into shape after the raid; the Orb still bears a small dent, said by some to date from that very morning. And Blood’s audacious near-miss changed history in a small but permanent way: after 1671, the Crown Jewels were never again shown to the public by a lone old keeper for a coin, but were placed under permanent, heavy armed guard — and they have never been stolen since. When you stand in the Tower today and look at the crown of England behind its glass, you are looking at the very object that a charming Irish rogue once beat flat with a hammer and tried to carry out of the gates under his coat — the closest anyone in all of history has ever come to stealing the crown itself, and got away not just with his life, but with a royal pardon and a fortune, for reasons no one has ever been able to explain.

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